Attacking tactics can put Carsley in box seat

Host of U-21 winners promoted as interim boss makes his case to succeed Southgate

- Dan Kilpatrick

AS HE prepares to audition for the impossible job, the big question for England’s interim manager Lee Carsley is whether he can get the team playing the kind of exciting, attacking football that Gareth Southgate was either unwilling or unable to coach.

There is no quibbling over Southgate’s results across his eight years in charge — he led England to nine knockout wins in four major finals, three more than they managed between 1968 and 2016 — but his critics claimed they did not win well enough.

In the end, there was something in this, as a Spain team widely regarded as less complete than England at the start of the summer outclassed Southgate’s side in the Euro 2024 Final in July, playing an attractive brand of passing football.

Carsley (right, at training yesterday) may be unglamorous and widely unknown, but he has a record of winning a tournament with the kind of progressive football that many of Southgate’s critics have long wanted to see from England.

Two summers ago, Carsley’s England Under-21s did what the seniors and England Women could not, by beating Spain in a Euros final — this country’s first success in the competition since 1984, denying their opponents what would have been a fourth title in 12 years.

And they did so playing outstanding football which was fluid, inventive, easyon-the-eye and, above all, effective.

Carsley’s U-21s dominated the ball, but it was not the sterile possession of England at this summer’s Euros, when Southgate’s side tended to sit back on one-goal leads and struggled to break down stubborn opponents.